Well Said
Rebuttal of a liberal viewpoint on poverty in Milwaukee by Patrick McIlheran courtesy of Charlie Sykes' blog:
"The question isn’t why we tolerate these inequities so much as why we tolerate the personal dysfunction that is behind them. I suggest it’s because what we find more intolerable would be the kind of intrusiveness into the lives of the very poor that could help them become as prosperous as most Americans are. We cannot bring ourselves to forcibly make people not become pregnant while unmarried. We will not force children to pay attention in school or, for that matter, attend school. We won’t mandate a longer time horizon, a change in personal outlook, a resulting ambition to learn a useful career at MATC.
I don’t know that we should. I do know this, though: The question of North Ave. is not how it can be that some have so much while others on the same street have so little. Rather, it is why some fail to do the fairly simple things — stay in school, delay childbearing until marriage, learn a skill to permit employment — that most Americans of every race, ancestry and neighborhood manage to do, making them middle-class and relentlessly affluent."
Amen.
posted by Jake at
09:19
1 Comments:
I thought you might find this interesting. It's from an article posted here:
http://patriotpost.us/alexander/edition.asp?id=484
"To wit, the truth -- and it is a hard truth for men who have abandoned their families, but a harder truth for their children: According to the CDC, DoJ, DHHS and the Bureau of the Census, the 30 percent of children who live apart from their fathers will account for 63 percent of teen suicides, 70 percent of juveniles in state-operated institutions, 71 percent of high-school dropouts, 75 percent of children in chemical-abuse centers, 80 percent of rapists, 85 percent of youths in prison, and 85 percent of children who exhibit behavioral disorders. In addition, 90 percent of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes. In fact, children born to unwed mothers are 10 times more likely to live in poverty as children with fathers in the home.
"[The causal link between fatherless children and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime," notes social researcher Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, adds, "[The absence of fathers] from family life is surely the most socially consequential family trend of our era.""
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